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MOROCCO

Money manager brothers sentenced for laundering marijuana millions

An investment manager was jailed for six months on Tuesday while his younger brother, a banker, received a suspended sentence from a Geneva court after the pair admitted to laundering 12 million euros in Moroccan drug trafficking revenue.

The trafficking involved illegal cannabis transported from Morocco to France.

A 48-year-old man, identified as M., received a suspended sentence of 30 months in addition to the six months of “firm” jail time, the Tribune de Genève reported.

He was arrested in October for using a financial company as a platform for laundering the illegal drug revenues.

A 38-year-old man identified as N., a former investment manager at HSBC in Geneva, got a two-year suspended sentence for playing a secondary role in the financial coverup.

Geneva justice authorities seized four million francs from a bank account and safe of the elder brother, the Tribune reported.

The money was carried across the Swiss border from France in plastic bags.

The pair, who cannot be identified because of Swiss privacy laws, have also been ordered to pay 50,000 francs in costs to the authorities.

The men were involved with a group of at least 17 other people who have been arrested by French police for smuggling pot from Morocco and selling it in France.

Swiss and French investigators cooperated in cracking the case under an operation code-named “Virus” begun last fall.

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MONEY LAUNDERING

US files lawsuit against scandal-hit Danske Bank

The United States and a US pension fund have filed a claim in a Danish court seeking more than $1.6 million for lost investments following a money laundering scandal that engulfed Danske Bank, their lawyer confirmed.

US files lawsuit against scandal-hit Danske Bank
Photo: Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen/Reuters/Ritzau Scanpix

“A lawsuit was filed in September against Danske Bank and its former CEO Thomas Borgen,” lawyer Thomas Donatzky said on Tuesday, adding that he could not provide any details.

The Danish financial daily Børsen, which first reported on the lawsuit, said the US government and pension fund were seeking 10 million kroner (1.3 million euros) due to losses suffered after shares in Danske Bank plunged in 2018 when the bank got caught up in huge money laundering schemes.

An investigation carried out by an outside law firm for the bank found that it could not account for the origin of more than $220 billion that flowed through its Estonian branch from 2007 to 2015, much of which was suspected to have come from Russia.

Borgen resigned in the wake of the scandal and the bank closed its operations in the Baltic States and Russia.

“The contingent liabilities related to civil shareholder claims and related amount described in today’s media coverage is part of the disclosure in our Annual Report for 2020,” Danske Bank said in a statement.

The report put the total of such claims at 12.4 billion kroner at the end of 2020. 

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